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1. #PORTAL TURRET PAPERCRAFT HOW TO#
2. #PORTAL TURRET PAPERCRAFT FULL#
3. #PORTAL TURRET PAPERCRAFT SOFTWARE#
4. #PORTAL TURRET PAPERCRAFT PROFESSIONAL#

The in-game animation is too fast to actually understand how the designers intend the legs to work, but it makes enough sense for something that isn't very critical to the story or gameplay. It is fairly obvious that the kneecaps were intended to fill in that gap in the body, but this scene shows that the legs were actually intended to coil and telescope out from the body - something that could never be done in real geometry. In Portal 2 the player makes their way through a factory that builds Turrets, so we get to see a better vision of what the original designer intended. The Turrets are basically an Apple-styled lozenge made from glossy white plastic that breaks open into various moving components. The Turrets are meant to be deadly, but also delicate - hence the spindly legs which are reminiscent of the Striders and Head-crabs from Half-Life, an earlier Valve game. While the Portal games were created using the same CGI as the modern Transformers movies, the creators wanted to make a world that emphasized realistic physics, as that is the core mechanic of the game. These robots look more like a magical swirling cloud of spikes than anything hinged or mechanical.

#PORTAL TURRET PAPERCRAFT SOFTWARE#

A bad example, on the other hand, is the modern Transformers reboot, where the aesthetic was driven by complex rendering software that is good at pumping out polygons. This meant that Hasbro could make working toys fairly easily - sticking to realistic toy mechanisms drove the aesthetic of the cartoon. A good example is the 1980's Transformers toy line - the transformation from vehicle to robot made sense even if the range of motion of the anthropomorphized robots were fudged to make them more human like. In videogames and movies, almost nothing is designed by an engineer and if a mechanism seems to make sense to the casual observer it's good enough. When I began thinking about the Portal Turret I knew it wouldn't be a simple conversion from a 3d object created using surface or NURBS space to solid or Parametric space.

#PORTAL TURRET PAPERCRAFT PROFESSIONAL#

I've been using SolidWorks for the past 14 years in school and as a professional to make consumer products as an industrial designer, but every project presents new challenges. Loctite power grip pressure pack (glue) 2" & 3/4" thick pink foam insulation sheets * All photos were taken by me with an iPhone4 except for the hero shot on the blue background, which was done by the ThinkGeek staff photographer, Chris Hoyer.

#PORTAL TURRET PAPERCRAFT FULL#

Aphius - This flickr page chronicles a valiant effort to make a full scale Turret with papercraft. TJ Coffey - This flickr page shows an amazing working Turret with pop-out wings and airsoft guns. Voplin props made an amazing Portal gun and every other project on their page is mind-blowing as well. His is at a different scale, uses other production methods, and contains more electronics. Citizen Snips, who started his Turret around the same time as I did, but managed to finish his in a more reasonable amount of time. I'd like to acknowledge some other builders who inspired me to this huge project:

I'd guess that it weighs around 20 pounds, but it's such an odd shape that it's impossible to lift in one piece - the front legs tend to fall out.

The entire model is about 48" tall at the top of the egg, with another 10" of antenna above that. This project took me a good 200 hours in my spare time after work over the course of several months and several hundred dollars worth of materials. The Turret proved to be a special challenge since it's so spindly and transforms in ways that leave no room for internal mechanisms. I had access to some behind the scenes assets, but they weren't nearly as helpful as you'd think - carefully examining screen-captures is best.

#PORTAL TURRET PAPERCRAFT HOW TO#

When I made this my company, ThinkGeek, was working with Valve to develop a number of licensed products and toys related to the two Portal videogames, so I was already taking a close look at how to recreate these virtual objects in the real world, just not at such an ambitious scale. It turned into a far more involved project than I expected, so be warned: this project is not for the faint of heart. This instructable is a walk-through of how I made my life-sized Turret from the videogame Portal.